Small business owners and entrepreneurs recognize that high rankings are an excellent means of free publicity for their company in the search engine performance rankings. Top results draw more traffic on blogs, improve leads and raise product and service sales.
Some of the best ways to help your online marketing activities is to study your rivals at the domain and on the page level. If you understand who your competitors are on the marketplace, an successful marketing plan and SEO strategy can be developed to drive traffic to your platform.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to conduct an effective audit of your competitors. It will help you to design a high-traffic website that draws visitors. Additionally, it will show you where to focus your marketing efforts to design an effective strategy that gets repeat visits and sales for your business.
Conduct an SEO Competitor Audit
SEO competitor analysis is the process of looking at your rival’s SEO strategies, then use those findings to boost your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this method, you can recognize the highest-ranking content of competitors, backlink profiles and their SEO tactics. You’ll then see what successful SEO tactics your rivals are implementing and copying. You will eventually find out which tactics didn’t work for them. This research will help you figure out what knowledge the audience feels is worthwhile. This will also help you to create better content marketing strategy.
It generally takes a while for sites to see a noticeable improvement in their SERP results.
There are three areas your business should use to conduct an analysis. They include:
- Technical SEO – This aspect focuses on how well a search engine can index your site and content.
- Off-Page SEO – It concerns inbound links from other domains to your website. These are generally natural links from trusted and prominent sites that act as an unbiased endorsement. It demonstrates to search engines that they can trust the content on your website.
- On-Page SEO – This area involves how a site owner has optimized its website content. It should contain relevant keywords and provide an exceptional user experience for visitors.
In the following steps, we’ll walk you through the process to conduct an SEO Competitors Audit of your own.
Step One: Identify Your Competitors
Companies should identify their SEO competitors on the market before they begin auditing their page. These are brands that rank in the same keyword areas where you conduct business. Sometimes, your competitors will be different from your direct business rivals.
Domain-Level Competitors– These rival websites compete with your business in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). They not only compete with you only using one or two search terms. These are also your competitors across multiple ones and categories.
Page-Level Competitors– Although these aren’t your direct business competitors, they compete with on individual keyword topics on a page level.
You can use several different methods to identify competitor domains. To find your domain-level competitors, visit Ahrefs’ Site Explorer can help you identify these rivals to see which one rank high in the same keywords that you use. You’ll enter your domain name and see which ones are your competitors. Other tools you can use include SEMrush’s Organic Research Competitors Report and Moz’s free Domain Analysis Tool.
Most business websites have two types of competitors: domain-level and page-level.
Write down a list of your ten closest competitors in a spreadsheet or word document that you can refer to later.
Step Two: Evaluate the Technical SEO in Competitor Sites
The first step is to conduct a Technical SEO audit of your site. During this phase, you’ll study the construction of your domain-level competitors’ sites to see how they perform against yours. You can also use this information to make your website better.
Screaming Frog’s Log Analyzer and
This process also involves analyzing your competitors’ sites structure, including how they organize their domains and subfolders. Next evaluate their site speed across different browsers, as well as desktops and mobile devices. Finally, see if the site is optimized for mobile devices.
Step Three: Analyze Your Rivals’ On-Page SEO
Next, your company should assess the quality of your page-level competitors. You’ll compare how your On-Page SEO measures up against other sites.
Start with a keyword analysis for your business. Identify the most popular ones keywords that are relevant to your business. For instance, clothing retailers should find keywords that their customers will look for when searching for stores. A home improvement store would enter ones that relate to their company.
Long-tail keywords, or search terms four words or longer, are even better than shorter ones. They can drive an enormous amount of high-converting traffic to your website and increase revenues for your business. You should evaluate your content quality and see how they rank in SERPs. These include your product pages, category pages, and blogs.
After you’ve identified keywords, check the keyword distribution and growth trends and identify top traffic pages and sub-folder-level content gaps.
You can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify what your competitors have done so far. For instance, in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you can enter the domain you want to analyze in the Site Explorer, then select “Top Pages” in the sidebar.
Step Four: Identify Off-Page SEO
Analyze the performance of backlink performance of your domain-level and page-level competitors during your Off-Page SEO audit. Backlinks are an important resource for improving the SEO of the websites. They are URLs which bridge site to site. Certain backlink terms include “inbound connections” or “inbound ties.”
Backlinks represent an endorsement from one site to another. They signal to search engines that your site others stand behind the content you offer. When multiple sites link to a site, Google considers the page as a high-quality one. It means that content is worthwhile and will boost the site’s ranking position or visibility in search engine results.
In Ahrefs, you select the “Best By Links” under its Pages section. It will tell you which one of your competitors’ pages have the highest number of backlinks. You’ll evaluate their linkable content types to find out which content gets the most clicks on their website. Next, document their top link building strategies, their private blog networks, infographics, and guest posts.
Which pages you analyze will depend on your goals. Next, find out which sites link to multiple competitors because they are more likely to link to yours too. Finally, analyze any gaps in your backlink strategy to find out which sites your competitors are getting links from that you aren’t.
How to Beat Your Competitors in SERPs
After you’ve collected data about your competitors’ top-performing content, backlinks, and keywords, you can use that information to hone in your marketing strategy. These are a few ways you can use this data to improve your standings in your search engine results pages.
You can study their content to learn how to improve your content, such as producing better images, more engaging content, or research.
This research can help you improve your page’s design, headers, title tags, and description tags.
Want your website to perform better against your rivals at the domain and on the page level? Finsbury Media has professionals who can help. Our experts can design your website to be engaging, fast-loading, mobile-optimized that will rank high in the results of the search engine pages and get you leads. Contact us today, to learn more about our services.